Cover Feature We Are The Ocean: ‘I Don’t Think We’re Ever Gonna Forget That Weekend’

According to many a broadsheet nowadays, rock music is on its way out. We, however, undoubtedly disagree, and with bands like You Me At Six, Young Guns, We Are The Ocean, Canterbury, Deaf Havana and Lower Than Atlantis creeping up radio playlists and the charts alike, we’re definitely not alone in that thought.

Obviously though, everyone has to start somewhere and in DIY Magazine’s latest cover feature, Sarah Jamieson gets to grips with the bands who are heading up rock’s assault on the mainstream. As promised, we also have full length interviews with each of the bands, and here, we catch up with Dan Brown from We Are The Ocean about beginning young and somehow ending up on the main stage at Reading and Leeds.

Your first ever tour was back in 2008 supporting You Me At Six. How was that as an experience?
It was cool. Obviously, we’d done kind of… weekend stuff before that - going up North, playing a couple of shows and coming back because we had college during the week. The tour with You Me At Six was the first proper thing that we did; staying out on the road as a tour. I’m trying to think back… It’s still one of our favourite tours. We remember so much about it, so much of it because we were experiencing everything for the first time. We’ve stayed really close friends with all of the guys that were on that tour so it’s always good to reminisce and think back to that tour because it was where we started. The two other bands hadn’t even been touring that long: us and You Me At Six kind of started at the same sort of time.

And at that point in time, you guys were so young too.
We were really young, yeah. Alfie, our guitarist, was fourteen at the time. We were all really young, and as I say, we were all still at college and school. so we would do that during the week and go on the road on the weekend.

Do you think it was those early experiences that have helped you to grips with the touring lifestyle you so rely upon nowadays?
It’s all just a big learning curve. It’s all things that you pick up from being involved in it. We didn’t really know what touring was all about. When we were growing up, we all knew that we wanted to be in bands, and we’d watched tour videos and stuff, and aspire to have that in our own lives, but didn’t really know what to expect from it. It’s cool though; you just go on the road with your best mates and get to play music to fans every night.

There is very much a sense of community within rock bands at the minute, and a lot of the bands in this feature grew up alongside each other. Do you think that sort of support system is to support your local music scene?
Everyone always likes to help out their local music scene. If it’s a band from your area, you always want to help them and see them do well. I do think that people definitely get behind it when it’s local music. Specifically, from our local area - there’s a few band now cropping up - but when we started up, there wasn’t really that many from our actual area. We were on the outskirts of London - there was a lot from London, but there wasn’t many from our actual town. Young Guns, You Me At Six, All Forgotten, Canterbury; they’re all based around London, but are still an hour, an hour and a half away from us. We still treat London as our local scene. A local show for us would be to play Camden Barfly or the Underworld, because there’s not that many venues where we actually live. I think any of the bands that come from around here.

And there’s this mentality within British rock music that allows for people to always be apart of this community: whether that means changing band line-ups, or leaving a band to take on a different role in the industry. Is that something cool to have been a part of?
It’s cool. You meet people on tours and end up making friends for life. One of our first tours was with You Me At Six and All Forgotten and we’re still really good friends with those guys. Unfortunately, All Forgotten have split up now, but we still speak to all of those guys regularly. Then, You Me At Six took us out in January. They took us to the States, which was just incredible. It’s just friends helping each other out. It’s, as you said, just like a great community.

I guess you’ve got to try and be a bit clever with it as well, in the sense of, don’t tour with the same bands too often. I guess people could get a bit sick of it if you’re always touring with the same bands. We just got off a tour with The Blackout, and I think that was our fourth tour with The Blackout. We’ve toured with them more than we have with any other band, but it’s cool; I don’t think it’s been a case of ‘Oh, you’re touring with The Blackout again?! You always do that!’ People just like to see us together. We have similar fan bases and people like nothing more than to see their favourite bands on one bill, all in one go.

It’s great to see a constant sort of mentality that sees friends take out friends on tour, especially when it allows for smaller bands to be added into the mix.
Yeah. Obviously there’s new bands that come through all of the time, and we make good friends with them as well. It’s just constantly making friends and finding new bands to get out on the road with. There’s always going to be new bands coming through that will join in and definitely benefit from people paying attention to the bands in the UK. There will be opportunities that maybe couldn’t have happened if the slightly bigger, or older UK bands weren’t paying attention.

How important do you think it is for British bands to take out other British bands?
That’s the whole point of a support tour; to bring a larger fan base. You kind of hope that some of their fans come to see you, and become fans of your band. You get a lot of kids coming down that are into both bands and I think it just makes for a really good night and a really great atmosphere. People are there for the whole bill, they’re not just there for the headliner. They love every band, from the opener to the headliner, and it just makes it a really cool time.

In terms of breaking out into the mainstream, has there been anything that’s just blown your mind? You obviously got to play the main stage at Reading & Leeds last year?
That was definitely one of them. That took a while to sink in and it still didn’t really feel normal when we played it. Even after we played it! I don’t think we’re ever gonna forget that weekend.

How about hearing yourself on the radio: what’s that like?
Yeah! It’s really cool. We had a lot of that this year. With the album that we put out last year, it went really well and Radio 1 loved it. We ended up getting all of the singles on the playlist, which was amazing. We were kind of, leaning towards Radio 1 and get them into the band with the first single, hopefully they’d grow to like it by the second single and then maybe we’d get C-list. But they loved it from the first single really, and so by the third single, we were on the B-list, which was amazing and we didn’t expect it to go so quickly.

Finally, do you have any particularly stand-out memories of early life in the band?
The first one that springs to mind is that we played Brixton Academy on Taste of Chaos. It was an Ernie Ball competition and we thought, ‘Yeah, we’ll enter it. It’ll be fun,’ and we ended up winning it! So, we opened up the Taste of Chaos show at Brixton Academy. I can’t remember if it was before that You Me At Six tour, or after it, but it was around that time. So, we hadn’t really done much, we hadn’t done much touring at all. We’d only really played pubs and already, we’d played Brixton Academy. It was kind of weird. It was hard to take in because we totally didn’t expect to be playing there at such a young age. That show will always stand out to me. We haven’t been back to Brixton since actually… We still haven’t played it since that show, which is kind of weird to think about how long ago we played it and how early in our career we did it.